Trucking newbie out to see the country with his son

Bill Nixon has been on the road for only a month with his driving partner, 21-year trucking vet Robert Meeker, but Nixon was a little busy doing everything else before getting into the trucking business.

“I was a firefighter, photographer, I own a chemical company still in Florida, and I’m a hypnotherapist,” Nixon said. “You want to be hypnotized, I can probably do it.”

Even with Nixon wearing all of those hats, he still had time to don a pilot’s hat, flying over a million miles in one of his many careers. He decided to get into trucking to spend time with his 28-year-old son and maybe even share a new profession.

“We were talking about him getting some sort of career,” Nixon said. “He loves to travel, he loves snowboarding, he just needs to be active. He just never found anything where he could be active. So, this came up and we went to a trucking school for nine weeks and he loved it. I said, ‘let’s go. I’ll spend a year on the road with you.’”

From Daytona Beach, Fla., Nixon said his son is about to start training and the plan is to team up for a dedicated run between Jacksonville, Fla., and Los Angeles for FedEx.

“I’ll enjoy being with him,” Nixon said. “We snowboard, we travel, we do all things together, now. [We’ll] just go see the country and get him a new career.”

Being a pilot and everything else, Nixon said he has seen a lot of things, but trucking gives him a new perspective. He said he was amazed at something he would have never seen while in the air.

“We were in Idaho and there was a herd of about 200 deer,” Nixon said. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my lifetime. Two hundred deer on the side of the road — I couldn’t believe it.”

With his new way of seeing things while on the road, Nixon also has a new-found appreciation for what truckers do and go through.

“I’ve seen the whole United States, mostly by jet,” he said. “This is kind of the only thing I’ve never done. It’s really different. It’s much harder driving rather than flying. I’ve done both. There is no comparison in the preparation to drive on of these than it is to fly – if you do it the right way.”